CROSSDRESSING BACH - Enrico Gatti & Rinaldo Alessandrini

“Cross-dressing Bach” is how Enrico Gatti and Rinaldo Alessandrini have chosen to call their Bach programme of rare works and alternative versions. They experiment with how marvelously enriched the musical writing becomes by changes in scoring, often with the instruments permeating one another, as the inversion of roles is reached. The flexibility of the instrumentation is linked to various stages in the composer’s career, to practical contingencies, and above all to the inexhaustible striving for perfection that induced Bach, according to his first biographer, Johann Nikolaus Forkel, to revise his works many times, refining them in every minimum detail. This compels us to take into account a rather different story from one that is rooted in our mentality as listeners, conditioned by the crystallization of the repertoire, and extorted by the Urtext-philosophy.”(From the booklet essay by Francesco Zimei)